That damned owl is a figure we’ve all become a little bit more accustomed to in recent years. Duolingo has quickly, and probably quite rightfully, become the best place to incorporate language learning into our everyday. Having been a member since 2015, I used to employed the common and lacklustre attitude to the app, strengthened by the joy one feels deep in their soul every-time they ignore a plea from that most green of mascots. 

“It’s for your own good,” he would cry as I placed my phone face down. 

“Shut up you big green bitch, I know what’s best for me,” I would retort after spending 3 hours mindlessly scrolling through tumblr, instead of designating a mere 5 minutes to actually bettering myself as a person. 

Having said that though, when lockdown hit like many others I actually started to take language learning a little bit more seriously. I made the decision to actually be grateful for the incredible resource Duolingo is, thanks to the tireless efforts of all those polyglots working behind the scenes. And here we are, a year later. 

I have just completed the elusive 365 day streak on Duolingo (it’s actually closing in on 600 by the time I post this). I’d like to reminisce a little bit about the things that I learnt during the year, and let you know whether I think Duolingo is actually good at teaching languages.  

My Background as a Language Learner 

They say mathematical minds are slightly more adept at music and languages, and back in 2015 when I first started using Duolingo, my mind was probably a lot more mathematical than it is now. That is to say, I used to have a particular knack for language learning that I think came about as a combination of factors; being young, inquisitive, and generally more intuitive to the ways in which different languages worked, as well as having to learn Welsh as part of my compulsory education since I started it. 

By the time I came to do my French and Welsh GCSEs, old Wernicke up there in my head had certainly endured his fair share of strengthening, and by some stroke of luck, I can still manage to pick up languages pretty well. However, I am lazy as shit, and if I worked hard I could probably be a lot better. I say all this so you can contextualise the things I say later, about how easy or hard I found a certain language. 

Pieces of the Puzzle   

I would like to counter that it is not a mathematical brain that is good at language, but a brain that is good at English (or any other first language). One of the first things my A level French teacher told the class, was that paramount to learning French, was learning the composite parts of English and how they worked. This includes all the usual bits like adjectives, nouns, verbs, pronouns, adverbs, prepositions, articles, but also general grammatical structures, subjects, objects, how parts of the language were playing off each other, why they did this, and whether it was irregular for them to do so. Once you know all this it’s far, far easier to grasp what’s going on in other languages when they flip these rules backwards and upside down. To learn a language, it is not necessary to, but perhaps incredibly helpful to learn about languages in general. 

Perceived Progression

Thanks to the opportunity to learn all these languages throughout high school and college, I also picked up on something else I have found incredibly helpful while using Duolingo. A base knowledge of the order in which linguistic concepts could and should be learned. By this I mean, usually most people will not begin a language by translating sentences, but by learning the most basic of everyday words and phrases. Hello, goodbye, thank you, you’re welcome, excuse me, I’m sorry, my name is…etc. Usually after that the basics are colours, numbers, animals, descriptions, basic sentences, present tense, questions, negatives, other tenses and so on, so on. Thanks to this, the progression of Duolingo courses never really throws me off, and I always have a vague but nonetheless reassuring idea of just about where I am when it comes to my learning.   

How I Spent the Year…

So far I have seriously tried the Duolingo courses in French, Norwegian, and Korean, however I completed the French course way back in 2018, so have not factored that in as part of my year of language learning, especially since the French course has changed drastically since then. 

I started the year with Norwegian and moved onto Korean almost exactly 6 months into the year. I gave up with Norwegian not because it was too hard, but just because I wanted to try something new and I’d been watching too much Reply 1988. Below I’ve detailed how easy and enjoyable it was to learn these languages, and how Duolingo factored into that. 

Norwegian 

• Norwegian was such a pleasant language to dip into learning. It’s one of the easiest for native English speakers to learn, as it’s really similar grammatically to English, and has a lot of words that sound incredibly similar to their English counterpart. But most importantly, verbs don’t conjugate based on person or plurals, which if you’re a language learner, you know is a true blessing. 

• I think the Duolingo module and lesson structure just fits with Norwegian, and I found in this course more than any of the others I’ve tried on there, that the previous concepts were really well integrated into later modules, rather than simply forgotten about like in some of the other languages. This really helps with retaining vocabulary, and grammatical structures and rules. 

• However, as a small note on recall, since I left Norwegian in the dust despite doing quite a lot of the course, while I don’t think it would be that hard to get back with it, it’s a testament to how much I actually learned thanks to Duolingo that I went back to try a Norwegian lesson a few months ago and couldn’t believe how complex the concepts were that I was flying through when I was doing it every day. It’s amazing what 15 minutes a day can do, but as soon as you stop practicing every day, you’re going to lose some competence. But this is true of any language learning platform, and has everything to do with me, not Duolingo. 

• Duolingo’s stupid sentences (sentences that you’d never say in real life but help with language learning) are a big thing within the community, and I found that they appear pretty often in Norwegian. They actually really helped here, and I began forming Norwegian sentences for completely imaginary situations pretty easily. 

• The one downside to Duolingo Norwegian is that it has some very strange rules, that are vastly different to how many other languages operate. If you’re using the phone app rather than the online site, these rules go completely unexplained and it’s down to your intuition to find out how they work. I can see how this could be helpful, but it’s also sometimes slightly disheartening to a new language learner. I think that sometimes you really need some extra teaching to explain concepts before you see how they work in practice. This is exacerbated by the fact that the tips section of Duolingo (the bit that actually explains the theory and grammar behind the language to you) still isn’t available on the phone app, for some unknown reason. 

Korean 

• A lot of people say the Duolingo Korean course is bad for learning Korean, and while I don’t doubt that it is massively lacking in areas, such as the really idiotic romanisation they use, questionable translations, or the terrible audio accompaniments, for me it was probably the simplest one I’ve tried. Having said that, if you’re going to try learning Korean on Duolingo, make sure you’ve already got to grips with Hangul – it’ll make the first few modules (arguably the worst part of the course) so much easier. 

• Korean has elements that are so far removed from English that it’s almost impossible to understand how they work without onboarding a boat-load of theory to support your learning. I think it’s probably detrimental to the language learning process not to know and be aware of some parts of Korean, such as particles, because native English speakers have no reference for them to fall back on. This is why the tips part of the Korean Duolingo course almost becomes compulsory, in a way it likely isn’t for many romance languages. This wouldn’t be a problem, if, once again, the tips part was actually available on the phone app! Like, you can probably tell, but I just can’t understand why they’ve never added it, it would be so helpful. 

• I think the assumption is that if you’re going to seriously learn a language then you’re probably going to use Duolingo in tandem with other language learning services, and because of the absence of the tips section, when it comes to learning Korean this is a definite must. If you already know the theory however, which is admittedly super easy to find with a simple Google, Duolingo is very effective for learning a base level of Korean. 

• The Korean course is also super short, but the modules are longer than Norwegian and any other course I’ve tried. I found this enjoyable, because you get a lot of practice, but there is a ton of new vocabulary in every new module, and I imagine this is a complete overload for someone dabbling in Korean as their first language learning experience. 

• As a final note, sometimes the need for Duolingo to mark an answer as definitively correct or incorrect contrasts with Korean’s fluidity when it comes to noun order, or word meaning. By this I mean, the Duolingo Korean grammar is really rigid, which leads to learners being told that their answers are incorrect, when technically, they aren’t. This can’t be particularly helpful to the learning process.

What are the Good Things About Duolingo? 

1. The app and site are very intuitive, and for a first time user it’s easy to understand how progression works. 

2. The setup of lessons is easy to grasp, with new vocabulary being introduced in each one, which becomes more ingrained as you move up the levels. You can tell when you’re completing them that, while they are slightly repetitive, there is no better way to learn a language, and the setup of Duolingo courses is genuinely based on the science of effective language learning.

3. I can’t speak for the quality of all the courses, but it’s very clear that Duolingo has an incredibly dedicated staff that genuinely care about providing a top-notch resource for learning a language. From the way it looks to me, each language has its own team of native speakers and past learners that have become fluent that curate the best course possible. There really is nothing quite like it out there, aside from LingoDeer, but I feel like the simplicity of Duolingo means it definitely pulls ahead of its competitors. The value of a site like this cannot be overstated, and the fact that there is still a free version available earns it the top spot among other multi-language learning platforms. 

4. The variety of lessons available allows you to customise your learning process more than you may realise. Aside from the general learning practice, there are practice lessons that you can do when you’ve completed a module to refresh your memory or understanding, mastery lessons that test how fluent you are in the language and give you a definitive score based on how much you’ve ‘mastered’, test outs, which are pretty helpful if you already know some of the earlier concepts in a language because you can test out of them and move onto concepts you’ve never learned, and the restore lessons that Duolingo promptsyou to complete if you’ve spent too long away from a skill, which help with recall.

5. The daily streaks help miles with learning if like me, memory isn’t your strongest point. Especially now that I have a 365 day streak under my belt, it’s very rare that I forget to log onto Duolingo to complete a lesson, and I would be genuinely pretty upset if I ever ended up losing it. While this doesn’t necessarily play into effective language learning, just getting people onto the app definitely helps. Anything is better than nothing, after all. 

6. The league rankings are really effective when learners pay heed to them. For those who might not know, Duolingo leagues are a random assortment of other Duolingo users, that the app automatically places into a leaderboard based on when they completed their first lesson of the week. If you are one of the top three learners who have gained the most XP (i.e done the most lessons) in the week, you advance to the higher leagues, with the highest being diamond league. This sense of competition is a great motivator, and some weeks I found myself having completed whole sections of the Norwegian course just to chase that top spot. However, just like the daily streak, it’s only effective so long as learners pay attention to it. 

7. Duolingo’s language courses are regularly being updated on an individual basis. This means even if you finish a course, you likely won’t have to wait that long before you can go back and learn some extra stuff. It also means that if you manage to finish a course you should rejoice while you can. They’re always updating the app as a whole too. As I write this duolingo recently went through a big update, adding the 3 pillars of learning to complete every day, and completing overhauling the structure of the language learning process.

8. This option is not available on all of the courses, but when I was using Duolingo to learn French, the ‘stories’ were incredible. Rather than doing the regular lessons, these stories offer a refreshingly different way to learn, that involves actually using the language in everyday situations. It also helps learners get to grips with some of the more complex stuff, like different tenses, in an engaging way. Right now, the Duolingo stories are only available on the German, French, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese, for English speakers courses. 

9. The range of languages Duolingo offers is genuinely unparalleled by any other language learning resource. While this may mean particular courses are lacking in specialisation, the freedom to stop learning one language and move immediately onto another, while not particularly helpful for achieving fluency (or as close to fluency as Duolingo can get you) the ability to learn as you please is incredible. Duolingo just added a Haitian Creole course, and I’m waiting and crossing my fingers for an option to learn Jamaican Patwah. 

10. Thanks to the regular updates, the feedback you get on your individual language learning is becoming more thorough. You have the option to revisit your mistakes, which is always helpful if you find yourself making similar ones over and over again, and now Duolingo even lets you know what time you tend to take lessons, and when you do the best. You get a percentage score out of one hundred for every lesson, and now the XP goes toward monthly badges which stay on your profile and are a great incentive. 

What Are Some Bad Things About Duolingo?

1. Nowadays it’s a lot harder to earn lingots, which are the in-app currency you use to purchase things like streak freezes. These automatically apply if you end up missing a day. This is obviously so more people will pay real money in the app to access this stuff, and it’s even slightly impossible for Duolingo Plus members to earn these, which is particularly cheeky on part of the developers. But like any growth focused company, they have employees to pay, so it’s just an evil we’ll have to put up with for now. 

2. Back when I started learning and Duolingo was less of a money hungry conglomerate, it was really easy to earn lingots. This might also have been a curse in disguise however, as when I started learning I regularly used streak freezes to get out of having to do a lesson. And, on this topic, if your only focus is on keeping the streak going up, you can simply take a practice lesson for the easiest module in the course, and save your streak without actually having learned or studied anything of value. When the focus is just on getting users onto the app, rather than on the quality of their learning, it does cheapen the whole experience of Duolingo a little bit. 

3. The lessons will obviously never compare to being taught by a real teacher for many reasons, because as I’ve mentioned a few times, Duolingo doesn’t include any theory in its lessons. For an app that’s meant to be used by self taught language learners, this is extremely detrimental, as it hampers further learning. Yes, using the language is the most important thing to learning it, but if you don’t know what’s going on behind the scenes, you can’t apply those same grammar rules in other similar situations. Expecting that much intuition from language learners just leads to disrupted and ineffective learning, and results in the learner giving up because they may not be able to grasp a certain topic that in actuality may be quite a straightforward or small one. 

4. To add to the above, not knowing the theory can also hamper recall. If you aren’t made aware of how all the composite parts are meant to work together, while you may remember certain words from the module, entire concepts can simply disappear from your memory. The solution to this is an incredibly obvious one, and one that since I’ve mentioned before you may be aware I have a personal vendetta against Duolingo for not implementing, and it’s MAKE THE TIPS SECTION AVAILABLE ON THE MOBILE APP. 

5. It’s impossible to become fluent in a language by just using duolingo. This is pretty obvious, because if you’re actually serious about learning a language, you’re going to need to get out there and speak to real people. But it also means that to get an in-depth view of any language, you’re probably going to have to use a few other resources, too. Again, if you genuinely want to learn a language this shouldn’t be a problem. However, because of the way Duolingo courses are structured to support fluency, but not provide it entirely, you can’t just use it for survival versions of a language either. This means you have to take on the commitment to genuinely learning the language, which may lead people to give up because they’re stuck in this middling version of language learning, or don’t want to take on the obligation. Perhaps Duolingo could provide actually useful basics and everyday phrases at the start of their courses, because there’s no way knowing how to say man, woman, and apple is going to be helpful for anyone wanting to visit another country. 

6. The lessons are repetitive to the extent that after the first level, you can most always guess what the answers are. This is especially true if you use the default duolingo setting, which provides you with flashcards rather than making you type out the answers yourself. You should look to turning this off, it seems to come and go randomly on mobile, especially if you’re learning a language with a different script. 

7. The lesson structure doesn’t make you retry the question you got wrong until the very end, and the app doesn’t give you any indication of why you were wrong. This means mistakes become sort of ingrained. If you get a new word wrong the first time round it fucks with you psychically and you end up getting it wrong quite a lot. Mistakes in general don’t really work with the separate tab, since you forget the context in which that original mistake was made. There should be some way to integrate them into the lessons themselves more than actually just doing them again at the end, and in the final level test. 

8. Duolingo know how to make money and as time goes on, it’s becoming evident that that’s all they want. The ads are getting incessant and the 5 lives thing for lite users is stupid – people should have the freedom to make mistakes when learning a language, it’s kind of an important part of the process. It’s all to push people to give Duolingo their, frankly not that affordable, subscription fee. The experience is sometimes so devoid of the streamlined process you get when you pay, Duolingo claiming it aims to be a free language learning resources is a borderline slap in the face. But, of course, it is well judged because there are very few other services that can rival it, even in its lite form. Still though, I reminisce of the days when one could simply hop on duolingo without having to worry about making mistakes or else being forced to pay.

Closing Thoughts

I can’t recommend something that has to be paid for (and who’s social media manager has somehow escaped ‘silence brand’ style critique), and unfortunately Duolingo is definitely moving in the direction of phasing out the free sections of its app altogether. That’s capitalism I suppose, even Babel is not beyond its greasy reach. 

Aside from that, if you can put up with the lite version then definitely do it, try a year on Duolingo and see how much you learn. Even if it’s not to become fluent in the language, getting into a language learning habit can only be healthy for your brain. Plus languages are the keys to culture, as you learn more of your language, perhaps you’ll fall in love with the country or countries that speak it. 

Of course, don’t forget to take Duolingo’s method with a pinch of salt. Sometimes it can be a little annoying, but learning a language at your own pace is worth it. If you really do want to get good, focus on your mistakes, use outside resources, and access Duolingo through a combination of the mobile app and desktop site.